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May 4, 2007
The Wicked Civilisation
By Iftekhar Sayeed
After the end of the cold war, the target of western demonization shifted from the defunct "ŽSoviet Union to the anticipated new adversary, the Muslim world. Supposedly universal "Žconcerns -- women and democracy-- were brought to bear with obsessive focus on Islam, "Žto the exclusion of other civilizations where these were, by the same yardsticks, "Žlegitimate concerns-- including the West. "Ž
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The demonization of the Soviet Union came to an abrupt stop with the disappearance of the alleged demon. New allegations were immediately raised against the Muslim world, large parts of which had been partners of the west against the former Mephistopheles. Only the Muslim world posed any threat to the west - especially to America - and that, too, for good reasons, as the West knew well.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict had been there for decades, and now that the common enemy had departed, it was time for Muslims to settle old scores. So, it was not surprising that the London-based Economist newspaper devoted an entire survey to "Islam and the West" in August, 1994. "One of the commonest prophecies of the mid-1990s," opined the newspaper, "is that the Muslim world is heading for a fight with other parts of the world." No points for guessing which other parts they might be.
Why did the Economist think that Islam might go to war with the West? Not because of Israel, or the Gulf War, or the treatment meted out to the Algerian Islamists who won elections there - no, not by a long shot; but because Muslims "feel ashamed of the past few centuries" when they were humiliated by the West. That is to say, Muslims have an irrational chip on their shoulder, not any valid grounds for complaint. After all, India and China had also been humiliated, but they weren't griping against western civilization (of course, this line of reasoning undermines the Economist's thesis, but never mind).
Then comes the demonization, and on two fronts: democracy and women. This article will deal mostly with propaganda centred around the second: and the question it will raise is this - why don't western concern for women and lack of democracy extend to other civilizations?
"It is perfectly true that the condition of most Muslim women is not good," observes the newspaper. Let us concede the point that it is "perfectly true" (despite the figures I quoted from a World Bank report on health care (1993) - page 217 - in my article "The Perils of Cultural Absolutism" to the effect that Muslim women are the safest in the world, not only from others, but also from themselves: see here.
The Indian Woman
I have never read anywhere any statement to of the kind that "It is perfectly true that the condition of most Indian women is not good", for instance. This may be because the condition of most Indian women is, in fact, good, or, for that matter, very good. Let's look at the facts.
The Economist quotes ?inevitably - chapter and verse from the Koran: chapter 4, verse 34 ("On women"). "The hard-nosed version of verse 34 has God saying that men "have authority" over women, and that if the women cause trouble they should be beaten." Ergo, Muslim women are beaten black and blue by their men-folk.
The Economist's logic is interesting. It rests on the major premise "All people abide by the precepts of their holy books". Jesus Christ said to his followers: diligite inimicos vestros (love your enemies); ergo, all Christians have loved their enemies and never - perish the thought - gone out of their way to make enemies. QED.
Homicide and violence take a toll of only 3.6 hundred thousand disability-adjusted life-years (compared to 4.3 for women in market economies), Chapter 4, Verse 34 notwithstanding; and the most surprising figure is that related to self-inflicted violence: women in mature economies lose 4.9 hundred thousand DALYs compared to women in the Middle East, who inflict wounds on themselves measuring up to 2.7! Indian women are safer than women in market-economies (only 2.8 hundred thousand DALYs lost), but suffer 10.8 on that scale when it comes to self-inflicted wounds. Why are Indian women so lacking in self-esteem and so depressed?
Tavleen Singh, a columnist for India Today observed (June 19, 2000, page 18): "There are other things we do not see or choose not to....So, it took an American current affairs program, Sixty Minutes, to bring out the full horror of the status of women in Indian society....I watched it in an American living room and saw, as if for the first time, the ultra-sound clinics that provide the new, scientific tools of female infanticide. No longer is it necessary, except in some remote villages, to kill new born girls by burying them alive or poisoning them because they can be killed even before they are born....More than 95% of abortions in India are of female fetuses. We accept this unquestioningly because that is the way things are in our country, just as we accept the fact that thousands of young women are burned to death every year because they do not bring enough dowry....It is again hard to blame our poverty for the ultra-sound clinics since it is mainly middle-class women who patronize them."
Of course, that is progress: from infanticide to foeticide aided by modern technology. But two questions loom: why don't the western media focus on this Indian issue? And why doesn't this happen in Muslim countries?
Female infanticide in Arabia was common when the Prophet Mohammed lived: it was the Koran that put an end to the practice, and it is still because of the Koran, modern technology notwithstanding, that female foeticide does not take place in Muslim societies. The Economist never quoted these lines:
"When the sun ceases to shine; when the stars fall and the mountains are blown away; when camels big with young are left untended, and the wild beasts are brought together; when the seas are set alight and men's souls are reunited; when the infant girl, buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain...." (81:1)
"When the birth of a girl is announced to any of them, his countenance darkens and he is filled with gloom. On account of the bad news he hides himself from men: should he put up with the shame or bury her in the earth? How ill they judge!" (16:57)
Why India's Dalits Hate Gandhi
As for the first question, the answer is simple. There is no need to demonize India, and, indeed, every reason to applaud the country for its democracy, to which the Muslim world seems impervious. According to the Economist, the Muslim world resists democracy because - wait for it - there is no concept of Original Sin in the Koran. "The eating of the fruit is just the breaking of a rule; God ticks Adam off, and that is that. There is no Original Sin, and no acquisition of the power to tell right from wrong. But many people would argue that that power is the basis of free will....And from the concept of free will comes the idea of individual responsibility; and from that, through the curlicues of history, the practice of democracy." (Similar arguments have been made against Islam by Larry Siedentop in his book Democracy in Europe. )
When you are out to demonize a civilization, you have to make mince-meat of logic - as well as history. It was news to me that the democratic Greeks were aware of Original Sin; and the Romans until they lost that notion with the onset of Empire. As for the non-Christian democracies of the world - India, Taiwan, South Korea - they all rest on the solid foundation of Original Sin. Well, well!
Now, let us turn to the subject of democracy in India. Democracy, claims The Economist, accepts the individual as the unit of society. Does Indian democracy? No.
Consider caste struggle - the name of an article in Newsweek (July 3rd, 2000, pages 18- 22). According to the article, "every hour, two Dalits [as untouchables are nowadays called] are assaulted, three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered and two Dalit houses are burned". The article notes: "Unlike racial apartheid in Africa or gender discrimination in the Muslim world, casteism hasn't captured the West's attention - yet".
That "yet" was printed a long time ago. Casteism still hasn't caught the West's attention, and since apartheid has been dismantled, the West is obsessed with a supposedly misogynistic Islam.
On 21 May 2002, a high-caste family in Thinniam branded two dalits with hot iron rods and forced them to feed dried human excreta to each other. The mainstream media in India, which has almost no dalit members, ignored it, according to Siriyavan Anand in Himal, November 2000 (http://www.himalmag.com/2002/november/perspective_2.htm).
The author continues: "In Tamil Nadu, the Thinniam incident did not make any impression on the government, media, civil society or the mainstream intelligentsia. Most newspapers and television channels did not report it and those that did, like The Hindu, ran shy of seeming scatological and referred to it as simply "a heinous incident". This neglect led to another Thinniam." This time Sankan, a dalit, while drinking tea with a friend at a shop was attacked by six caste Hindus. He was verbally abused and beaten up, after which an off-duty constable urinated in his mouth. Why? Because he had dared to pursue his right to a piece of land of which he had been cheated.
The author recounts other episodes. "In 2001, at Prichatur, 75 km from Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, caste-Hindu men paraded a dalit youth, Murugesh, in a procession and forced him to drink his own urine for 'the crime of relieving himself in the presence of the upper castes' (Deccan Chronicle 30 August 2001). Also in 2001, caste Hindu landlords from Chanaiyan-bandh village in West Champaran, Bihar, tied Dasai Manjhi, a dalit, to a pole, shaved his head and urinated in his mouth. But it was the dalit who landed in jail 'for felling the timber of his landlord' (The Times of India 11 July 2001). Lalit Yadav, a minister in the Bihar state government, held a truck driver Deenanath Baitha and cleaner Karoo Ram, dalits both, captive for over a month in June-July 2000. The minister and his cousin removed the fingernails of the driver and made him drink urine. Lalit Yadav was dropped from the ministry but remains a free man today. Again in Bihar, in September 2000, Saraswati Devi, a dalit woman was paraded naked on charges of witchcraft in Pakri-Pakohi, Karja block, Muzaffarpur district. A dozen persons tortured her and forced her to swallow human excreta. After Devi lodged a complaint, police visited the village but failed to 'nab' the accused."
The killing of women suspected of being witches is a frequent phenomenon in parts of eastern and central India. In 2002, five women were killed by tribesmen, apparently on the instructions of their priest, believing they were witches. The priest told them the "witches" had caused a spate of recent deaths in the area from malaria and diarrhoea. However, women's' rights groups say that local priests, tribal chiefs or greedy relatives declare widows or divorcees witches so they can take control of their property (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2166856.stm).
And yet the man who wrote the Indian constitution was a Dalit - BR Ambedkar. In his article "Why do India's Dalits hate Gandhi?", Thomas C. Mountain makes this acrid observation: "In India, supposedly the world's largest democracy, the leadership of the rapidly growing Dalit movement have nothing good to say about Mohandas K. Gandhi. To be honest, Gandhi is actually one of the most hated Indian leaders in the hierarchy of those considered enemies of India's Dalits or "untouchables" by the leadership of India's Dalits."
Why? First of all, Gandhi was a high-caste Hindu. "High castes represent a small minority in India, some 10-15 percent of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems."
Secondly, and this is much more significant, because Gandhi opposed the idea that Dalits should have the right to elect their own leaders, as was stated in the draft constitution. He used his usual tactic to have the clause removed - the famous (in this case, infamous) Gandhian fast-unto-death: tens of thousands of Dalits were slaughtered, and it was obvious that if Gandhi died, the violence started by the apostle of nonviolence would soar. Ambedkar backed down. On his death bed, he bitterly regretted this backsliding, and said that that had been the biggest mistake of his life. "To this day, most Indians still believe, and this includes a majority of Dalits, that Dalits are being punished by God for sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalit's only hope is to be a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated in a high caste."
In India, therefore, the vote is not an individual, but a collective act. According to Stanley J. Tambiah: "Ethnic equalisation, rather than freedom and equality of the individual, is the principal charter of participatory democracy in many of the plural and multi-ethnic societies of our time. It has been the experience in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia...."
A biographical approach best illustrates the complex tangles of Indian politics and Indian crime. In 1981, Phoolan Devi, a Dalit woman, and her cohorts were accused of slaughtering 22 upper-caste men, who, she claimed, had gang-raped her, in the hamlet of Behmai in Uttar Pradesh. She denied the accusations, but agreed to surrender to the police in 1983 by agreeing to the 70 different counts of extortion, kidnapping and murder outstanding on condition that she spend only 8 years in jail. In the event, she spent 11 - then the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh dropped the charges, and took her into his party! She went on to become MP. According to the police, of the 85 MPs from Uttar Pradesh, at least 28 had criminal records or serious charges against them in 1997. Indira Gandhi introduced goons to politics to get votes; since then, they have gone into politics for themselves. Phoolan Devi, despite becoming MP, was brutally murdered.
Though the film that Shekhar Kapoor made on the life of Phoolan Devi - Bandit Queen - found a receptive audience in Western cultural capitals, such as Cannes, "casteism hasn't captured the West's attention - yet", to quote the earlier Newsweek article.
In the same article, we read about how "untouchables" become "touchable" when they are dedicated to temple prostitution. Around 15,000 girls in rural areas are dedicated to divinity every year. "Somebody has to be dedicated or the goddess will be angry," explains Sister Bridget Pailey. The girls are married to god before puberty, and, after their first menstrual period, become sexual servants to the villages' upper-caste men. It's a form of sex-slavery that "hasn't captured the West's attention - yet".
Phineas Fogg and The Widow - Again
"India is set to adopt tough new laws to prevent the practice of sati, or the self-immolation by a widow on her husband's funeral pyre...." This was an Associated Press announcement that appeared in the Bangladesh Observer on 28th January, 2006. One would have thought that such laws would be redundant today. Not so.
"While rare," continues the report, "the practice still persists in some areas of the country, especially in deeply traditional rural regions where widows are often shunned because of a belief they will bring had luck and tragedy to the community." The report omitted the fact that those who commit sati - or are forced to do so by relatives and priests - become objects of veneration.
On September 4, 1987 in Deorala, a village in Rajasthan, 18-year-old Roop Kanwar burned to death on the pyre of her husband Maal Singh. Dressed in bridal finery, Roop Kanwar walked at the head of the funeral procession to the centre of the village and ascended the pyre. The family lit the pyre, aware that she was sitting on it, alive, with hundreds of onlookers watching the proceedings. Relatives fed a thousand people in honour of 'Sati Mata'.
On January 31, 2004, all the accused in four criminal cases of glorification of sati were acquitted. They included a former minister, a former IAS officer, an advocate and the president of the Rajput Maha Sabha (http://www.countercurrents.org/gen-shukla190304.htm ).
In August 2002, Kuttu Bai, 65, burned to death on her husband's funeral pyre in a village in central India Fifteen people were arrested over the incident, which took place in Madhya Pradesh state. They faced charges of murder and conspiracy and included the woman's two grown-up sons, who apparently did nothing to stop her.
ceremony say they were forced back by the angry crowd. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2180380.stm)
Twenty-five sati incidents occurred in the Bundelkand region of Uttar Pradesh in as many years. One of the cases was that of 18-year-old Javitri Devi of Jaari, a small village in Banda district. A temple to her memory was built in 1979 from the money collected in the impoverished village which, according to India Today (November 29, pages 43 - 45), "did not even have a dispensary". The temple's priest claimed that on the average around fifteen people came to pay respects, but during Navrati thousands poured in. "Several such sati mandirs and chabutaras dot the region's landscape...." After Rajasthan, it would appear that Bundelkand has the highest number of sati incidents, with three districts alone accounting for more than a dozen.
"All this is a part of our tradition and customs," observed Anil Upadhaya, former principal of a degree college and local historian. He defended sati, and berated the government for interfering in "voluntary sati". The educated appear to find nothing repugnant in the act. The people of the area are proud to have had so many satimatas.
Politicians cash in on the practice's popularity. With an eye on the Dalit vote, a local politician demanded that people be allowed to worship the place where Charanshah died and asked the police to "stop interfering in religious faith of the people".
On November 11, 1999, Charanshah, 50, "circumambulated the lit pyre four times, folded her hands and then climbed on to it without screaming or shouting. Before we could rush to rescue her, she was burnt to ashes," said her son, Shishupal. The village turned into a scene of riotous merriment.
In August 2006, a widow, Janakrani, burnt to death on the funeral pyre of her husband Prem Narayan in Sagar district in Tuslipar village in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Senior Madhya Pradesh police official Shahid Absar told the BBC that early investigations had revealed that she had not been coerced into performing the act (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5273336.stm).
A Different Kind Of Parental Love
In Taiwan, Lin Wen-piao mixed pesticide with yoghurt and milk, and fed the concotion to his two children before taking it himself; he had been diagnosed with cancer three days earlier. Though appalled, the Taiwanese sympathized with the 52-year-old unemployed construction worker in the southern city of Kaohsiung. This was in 2003.
"Yet some health experts viewed the deaths as part of a trend. While Taiwan is seeing a rise in family suicide-homicides, such tragedies stopped being oddities long ago in other parts of Asia, notably Japan," notes Associated Press reporter Annie Huang (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/08/world/main587450.shtml).
Between 1993 and 2003, 78 family suicides were reported in Taiwan. Mental illness plays a role, but more important are long-held East Asian beliefs about parental roles and duties.
In September 2001, a wealthy couple in the central county of Changhua had a large incinerator installed in their villa. They removed their slippers, arranging them neatly outside the incinerator door; they left a note complaining about Taiwan's political instability and expressing a wish to "leave this ugly world behind". Police found ashes and bone fragments from the couple's three children, ages 19 to 24, next to the incinerator. The badly burned bodies of the parents were found inside the furnace.
"Many of our parents consider children their own property or subordinates," says Wang Yu-min, an executive at Taiwan's Children Welfare Association. "They will live and die together with the children. It is a different way of showing parental love than in the West."
Mafumi Usui, professor of psychology at Niigata Seiryo University in Japan, notes that Japan has a long history of family suicides, and they are too frequent to make major headlines. So frequent, indeed, that Japan has phrases for them: "Ikka shinju" is when an entire family commits suicide; when a parent kills the children before killing himself, it's called "muri shinju."
Despite democracy appearing in many Asian countries, family suicides are persistent remnants of age-old traditions that required absolute obedience to parents or superiors.
"In Taiwan, adults have learned to fight for their self-interests when their own rights are invaded, but few children stand up to confront their abusive parents," said Wang.
Through Western Eyes
So far, we have seen that the Koran is not the cause of lack of democratic practice or disregard for the individual or of wife-beating. Other cultures-- admittedly without any concept of Original Sin-- have values and practices that the West should find, to put it mildly, bizarre. But we have seen that these practices haven't "captured the West's attention-- yet".
But what about the West? How does the western world regard women and democratic practice in the West itself? And while answering these questions, we must keep in mind the incontestable fact that we are talking about people endowed with the ability to tell right from wrong, unlike the rest of mankind, people who have known Original Sin.
The first thing to note is that western women do not suffer any harm through war-- they are at the delivering, not the receiving, end of the missile.
A UNIFEM report has it that " The economic cost of violence against women is considerable - a 2003 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceed US$5.8 billion per year: US$4.1 billion are for direct medical and health care services, while productivity losses account for nearly US$1.8 billion."
In peaceful Geneva, Switzerland, a randomly selected study of nearly 1,200 ninth-grade students revealed that 20 per cent of girls had experienced at least one incident of physical sexual abuse . See here
According to The Care Center (www.teencarecenter.org ):
--Of rape victims who reported the offense to law enforcement, about 40% were
under the age of 18, and 15% were younger than 12.
--Of 1,000 representative female students at a large urban university, over half had experienced some form of unwanted sex. Twelve percent of these acts were perpetrated by casual dates and 43% by steady dating partners.
-- Female adolescents are frequent victims of sexual assault and rape. The
incidence of rape in the United States peaks among young women 16 to 19
years of age. The reported incidence of rape and sexual assault reflects a
fraction of the actual frequency of this crime. The National Victim Center
estimates that almost 700,000 women are raped each year, and that 61% of the victims are under the age of 18.
- Female adolescents are at high risk for becoming victims of acquaintance rape or "date rape." Studies have shown that the highest incidence of acquaintance rape occurred in grade 12 and during the freshman year of college. Of the 25% of college women surveyed who reported having had unwanted sexual intercourse, 84% knew their assailant, 57% of the episodes occurred on dates, and 41% of the women stated that they were virgins at the time of the assault.
Again, this is probably an underestimation of the true incidence of date rape
Alcohol a factor:
- It is estimated that approximately one-half of assault cases involve alcohol
consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Moreover, while alcohol
consumption and sexual assault frequently co-occur, this phenomenon does
not prove that alcohol use causes sexual assault. Rather, alcohol contributes to sexual assault through multiple pathways, often exacerbating existing risk
factors. For example, the desire to commit sexual violence may actually cause alcohol consumption in that a male perpetrator drinks alcohol before
committing a sexual assault in order to justify his behavior. Whereas, among
college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and the sexual exploitation of women.
Date rape drugs:
- Date rape drugs or drug-facilitated sexual assault causes sedation and amnesia to the extent that a potential victim cannot resist or may not be aware of the assault. In fact, about 25% of the women who contacted the Canadian Sexual Assault Center reported that drugs were a factor in a rape.
The most commonly reported drugs in addition to alcohol to facilitate sexual assault are flunitrazepam and gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), which is now touted as a new recreational 'club drug'.
Long term effects:
-- Victims of marital or date rape are 11 times more likely to be clinically depressed, and 6 times more likely to experience social phobia than are non-victims. Psychological problems are still evident in cases as long as 15 years after the assault.
That's not a pretty picture for any society, especially one that claims to be the universal conscience, with the ability to tell right from wrong. Why should a society that respects women as individuals, unlike (remember) Muslim society, why should such a society present such awful statistics?
I will let Andrea Dworkin speak on the subject of western man's perception of western woman.
"The skin of white women has a meaning in pornography. In a white-supremacist society, the skin of white women is supposed to indicate privilege. Being white is as good as it gets. What, then, does it mean that pornography is filled with white women? It means that when one takes a woman who is at the zenith of the hierarchy in racial terms and one asks her, What do you want?, she, who supposedly has some freedom and some choices, says, I want to be used. She says, use me, hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want. The society tells us that she is a standard, a standard of beauty, a standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is a standard of compliance. She is a standard of submission. She is a standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she incarnates it; which is to say that she does what she needs to do in order to stay alive, the configuration of her conformity predetermined by the men who like to ejaculate on her white skin. She is for sale. And so what is her white skin worth? It makes her price a little higher. (http://www.voxygen.net/cpa/speeches/dworkintxt.htm)"
What Andrea Dworkin had to say about women being objectified in western society cannot be easily denied: and one does not have to go as far as pornography to see it. Advertisements routinely use women; there are women's pageants still; the diversity of lingerie that western, consumer society has dreamt up - and which is almost totally missing in a place like Bangladesh - can leave little room for doubt that women are meant to be gazed on - consumed - by men; I may not agree entirely with Andrea Dworkin, but she, and others like her, have a way of looking at western society in terms of which The Economist would thoroughly disapprove.
And, above all, her thesis explains the violence against women we have seen itemised by the Teen Care Center: "....among college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and the sexual exploitation of women." The large number of women raped on the campuses of American universities should give pause for thought as to what values are transmitted to young people, especially given the fact that most of the rapes are not reported; almost as if, there is an expectation of rape.
The Not-So-Great Republic
As for democratic practice, that fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a second expert opinion is all I shall offer in this lengthy article: that of Howard Zinn.
"We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.
"We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.
"And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Indeed, seven paragraphs in his article are devoted to articulating how president after president lied to the nation about going to war. (http://progressive.org/media_mpzinn030806)."
It has been estimated that the United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945 (index.php-context=viewArticle&code=WAD20070128&articleId=4610).
Today, it is easy to explain why the West obsesses over the demonization of the Muslim world - even where other civilizations exhibit the pathologies that are supposed to be peculiar (if they are at all real) to Islam. That no criticism of Indian democracy will be undertaken by the western media in its usual blitz of propaganda can be taken for a certainty now that India is America's ally; but this blindness to the shortcomings of Indian society and civilization, as measured by a western yardstick, antedates the recent love affair with India.
After the Cold War, and well before 9/11, the West knew that the Muslim world would now turn its attention to domestic concerns. The propaganda machine began to work overtime - and one result of this frenzied activity was the incoherent survey of Islam and the West served up, for instance, by the Economist. Propaganda, as all good propagandists know, need not be coherent: just persuasive and repetitive.
And Socrates has long ago told us that democracies are better at rhetoric than logic.